


Et le poête saoul engueulait l'univers

by centralsaints



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Artist AU, Drabbles, M/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-05
Updated: 2019-02-05
Packaged: 2019-10-23 00:39:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17673113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/centralsaints/pseuds/centralsaints
Summary: Gilbert thinks he's in love with Francis because he can't write about him.





	Et le poête saoul engueulait l'univers

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this idea more than a month ago in a drabble game on the HWD, and I tried to figure out how to write is ever since. I'm whipping out the writing style I had in Le Temps des Fleurs again because........reasons? Idk
> 
> The title is an "orphan sentence" from Rimbaud, meaning "the poet, drunk, yelled at the universe".

I.

Gilbert Beilschmidt, a writer on residency, talks to his neighbor for the first time at three in the morning, in the middle of a particularly heavy night of writer’s block. The man standing at his door looks exhausted though his eyes have the glint of an inspired artist and his hands are stained with paint. He has a streak of dark blue on his right cheek. He speaks to him in rapid French, too fast for Gilbert and his rusty knowledge of the language to catch in the late hours.

He needs an opinion on his painting. He saw light coming from the apartment and told himself that only artists or drunks are up at this hour of the night.

Two hours later, after Francis asked him which one he is, he’s sitting with him in the artist’s cluttered living room, the painting looking at them drinking the night away from its easel.

 

II.

Francis is a romantic and it shows. It shows in the way that he forgets he put away one of his brush in his hair to tie it in place, and in the way he calls Gilbert “dear”, even though they’ve known each other for only a week. In the way that he drinks his  _ café au lait  _ in the morning, green tea with lunch, and wine by the end of the afternoon, until late in the night. 

And Gilbert knows this because they spend more and more of their days together. Him typing away or scribbling things in a torn notebook on the old floor of Francis’s apartment, while he’s at work on a canvas. It was their state of being together, mutual creation fueling inspiration.   
  


 

III.

Francis painted until ungodly hours of the night. Gilbert could only write when darkness settles, for he is only inspired by the shadows that seem to dance in the corners of his apartment and the false impression that he is alone in the world. 

This might be why they worked so well together. They’re aware of each other’s presence in the dead of night, a constant, a comfort. Even then Francis doesn’t understand Gilbert’s rigid way of creating, planning and going over the details of each word.

It’s when Francis has to stop for the night, when the paint doesn’t respond to him anymore, when the people on the canvas tell him “ _ we can’t love you like you do”,  _ that he understands.

  
  


III.

Gilbert had heard of how beautiful Paris was, and it was for that reason he wanted to apply for the residency. But Paris was even more beautiful when you had a real Parisian to show you around, Francis said. 

In every corner of the city, Gilbert believes him. 

  
  


IV.

Gilbert thinks he’s in love. In love with Francis, and his exhausted smile in the middle of the night, his hands and his shirt stained with paint, his hair messy and eyes tired. Francis was beautiful even when he was tired, or angry, at himself or the paintings. 

Gilbert thinks he’s in love with Francis because he can’t write about him.

  
  


V.

Francis kisses him one night and runs his blue stained finger along his neck and jaw, probably leaving streaks of paint on his skin. He kisses Gilbert and it tastes of tea and honey, and he’s pretty sure he can feel the words on his skin when he reaches up and take it into his own. He breathes in the scent of oil paint and something he can’t identify, but maybe the shadows could tell him what it was.   
  
The ink on his hands might have stained Francis’s always too perfectly disheveled hair when he ran them through the strands that obscured his face, pushing them back almost angrily, hungrily.   
And it was over like it had started. Francis took his glass and drank, a smile in his eyes, still looking at the writer. 

Gilbert’s eyes traveled from his hands to his lips to his blue eyes and the strands of hair that were back in front of them. This time he was sure he could have written the whole universe in Francis’s palm. 

  
  


VI.

Francis looks different in the morning light. He looks less exhausted and his eyes are a more vibrant shade of blue. He forgets his English and sweet talks Gilbert in Molière’s language. 

For the first time, Gilbert fell asleep in Francis’s apartment before the sun rose up, and they both stayed silent about it. 

  
  


VII.

They go out that day to a café down the street. Francis tells him that he had his work exposed here when he first moved to Paris. “How many years ago was that?” Gilbert asks. 

Many, he says, eyes down on his drink. Nothing more, nothing less.    


Many.

  
  


VIII.

They read Rimbaud’s poetry. Well, Francis reads his book out loud and Gilbert listens, head in the other’s lap.

He feels slender fingers carding through his white hair. Gilbert has his eyes fixed on the drawings piled on the easel near the window. They’re mostly views of Paris, little corner that might often be forgotten by the eye of someone who’s seen the city a thousand times. 

One of them is a portrait. A portrait of himself, staring right back. His eyes are an uneasy shade of red on the paper. Francis had asked to pose for him, on the same old couch, facing the window, facing his corner of Paris. Nude. 

“I’m not a model, I’m a writer,” he’d said.

“You’re an artist,” Francis had responded, planting a kiss on his forehead.

 

  
IX.

The date of his return nears, and Gilbert finds himself never wanting to leave Paris. He wants to stay in the pocket world he and Francis created out of their neighboring apartments.

He doesn’t want to leave. 

He starts thinking about telling Francis that he loves him. 

  
X.

There’s an uneasy feeling in his stomach when Francis accompanies him to the train station. They didn’t create anything together the night before, instead sitting close on the couch, drinking, talking.

Francis still hasn’t told him why he came to Paris. Gilbert hasn’t told him about his love. 

They talked about being artists, their soul being fed by breathing life into something, about maybe they should make something together in the future, they could shake the entire art world with their joint mind. Maybe Francis could even come to Berlin sometimes. Maybe Gilbert could show him around. 

Their parting hug is tight like those of lovers and those who almost were. Francis takes his face into his hands when they part, and his smile is almost sad. 

  
  


XI.

Francis will never know how much he loves him. And he’ll never kiss him in the dim light of the work lamp lighting whatever painting was at work that night.  
  
That is the reality that hits Gilbert as the French countryside pass his eyes outside the train that brings him back to Berlin. He fell in love with an artist and artists are hard to love; Francis, though he never said it, never let himself be loved. He loved art, he loved drawing Gilbert in any and every position he could get him, he loved Paris and making Gilbert fall in love with it, and Gilbert did fall in love with the city, but also with the one person he couldn’t have.  
  
Francis’s heart is lost somewhere in between the Seine, one of the numerous portraits he did of Gilbert, and wherever he came from.

And that is why he will never know how much Gilbert fell in love with him, or how it stings that the kiss they shared at three in the morning when Francis smeared his cheek with blue paint, will remain their only kiss.   
  


XII.

It was raining when the train got to Berlin. Gilbert stepped in the puddles outside the station, on purpose.    
  
Before Paris, he would have avoided them. After Paris, he found himself standing in the rain with his suitcase, his head already buzzing with ideas for a new novel.   
  
His hair was drenched, as was his coat, but the feeling of the rain on his face was healing. It somehow felt like when Francis gently touched his cheek to wake him in the mornings where he’d fallen asleep on his couch. It felt like his blue stained fingers when he’d kissed him and they were drunk.    
  
And he would be okay. Francis would never know but it didn’t mean Gilbert did not love him. It didn’t really matter if it hadn’t worked out, if it had ended in a too tight parting hug and left a bittersweet taste on his tongue.

It never did quite work out for him. At least he’d have a story to tell.   
  
  


  
  



End file.
